ProArteDanza brings passion and high athleticism to their Season 2014 showcase at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre
The dance company ProArteDanza follows a simple guiding principle: passion in performance. It sounds obvious and hardly worth noting, just an easy word for dancers to use. But with this company, passion really is the essence — each piece of choreography is animated by inner fervor breaking out into rapturous intensity.
ProArteDanza celebrates its ten-year anniversary at the Harbourfront Centre this week with a full-length performance of their Dora award winning work …in between… from 2010, followed by a nine-part sampler of their other works from the last decade. Titled Season 2014, this show satisfies that basic desire we all have to be blown away by excellence; it’s a thrill to watch.
Toronto choreographer’s latest dance work elsewhere is playing at the Harbourfront Centre
Acclaimed Toronto choreographer Heidi Strauss’s latest work elsewhere, which debuted this week at the Harbourfront Centre, is almost there. It’s right at the edge, leaning out into the dark, grasping for something that keeps slipping away.
That’s how the performers put it, anyway, in a few short, poetic soliloquies interspersed throughout the performance. “It’s extremely close,” says dancer Molly Johnson, with the expression of someone trying to remember something beautiful. “You feel it… because you’re in it.”
This New Adaptation of The Misunderstanding Innovates and Enlightens
According to the French philosopher Albert Camus, life is absurd. Not silly or screwy or goofy, but fundamentally absurd, at the deepest level. His reasoning is pretty straightforward: the world doesn’t make sense and never will, but we humans can’t stop ourselves from desperately wishing and often pretending that it does, and so we experience a perpetual, gnawing disappointment that we can’t escape or articulate. Don’t despair, though; it makes for great theatre.
The Misunderstanding, an adaptation of Camus’ play about a prodigal son who returns home to visit his mother and sister, is currently playing at the charming Helen Gardiner Phelan Playhouse on University of Toronto campus. Needless to say, the returning son doesn’t find quite the joyous reunion he was hoping for. (The title may be the most sardonic joke in the play.)
Michael Rubenfeld is the kind of guy who easily turns his energy into action. “If I find myself complaining about something that I think is missing, that’s when I realize that somebody just has to do it,” the artistic producer of SummerWorks tells me over coffee at the Theatre Centre on Saturday.
That’s the energy that drove Rubenfeld to create the Music Series at SummerWorks three years ago, pairing musicians and theatre artists for innovative hybrid performances throughout the festival, and now it’s pushing him and his collaborators to start Progress, a brand new multi-arts festival of performance and ideas launching February 4-15.
Sometimes the simplest ideas are the most surprising. Écoute pour voir at SummerWorks is so straightforward you might just miss it: dancers pair off one-on-one with audience members, sharing a single iPod with two sets of headphones. Don’t shrug off the modesty of this concept—the performance is as beautiful as it is candid, and utterly satisfying.
![MisunderstandingFrontPostcard[1]](http://www.mooneyontheatre.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/MisunderstandingFrontPostcard1.jpg)
